Hoax bid drives real interest in one of the rarest games ever made.

Update (Jan. 28): The gold NWC cart mentioned in the below article has now been bid up to over $100,000. It's hard to tell if this is yet another example of shill bidding or if the interest in last week's auction has actually caused an immense increase in the perceived value for NWC carts. The current top bidder has a relatively low feedback rating and not much recent history in video game auctions, but other high bidders right behind him appear more involved in the game buying/collecting community.

Late last night, a gray NWC cart in "acceptable" condition was sold for $17,500 by brother collectors Mark and Matt Nolan after being listed earlier that day. The pair is talking on the NintendoAge forums about how they "took advantage of the market at the moment" by quickly listing and selling the rare cartridge while interest in the previous auction was still high.

Meanwhile, two more "very good" condition NWC cartridges—one gold and one gray—are currently attracting five-figure bids on eBay. As of this writing, the gray version is going for just over $10,000, while the gold cartridge has (despite a missing label) passed $33,000, a high but not incredible price for the "holy grail" of video game collecting.

The confluence of so many NWC auctions is pretty rare in itself; most years are lucky to see a single public sale of one of the 116 or so cartridges thought to be in existence after the carts were given out to contest winners and tournament participants in the early '90s. Then again, the ridiculous $99,902 final bid price for last week's NWC auction was an unprecedented amount for a single video game, drawing prominent press attention across mainstream outlets like AOL, Yahoo, the BBC, and Time.

That selling price appears to have been too good to be true. Writing on the NintendoAge forums, seller Stephen "Muresan" Ross says that the top bidder has already backed out on the sale, claiming that "their 2 year old placed the bid without their knowledge."

Ross can still try to sell to one of the other lower bidders on the list, but it seems unlikely that most of the other highest bids were more legitimate. The bids were inflated for a cart in that condition, especially considering that other gray NWC carts in better condition have generally gone for between $10,000 and $20,000 in the recent past. There's little reason that collectors would offer more for this beat-up cart than the $75,000 record set for a much rarer, complete-in-box Stadium Events that sold just a few months ago.

This auction is going to make it to all the news outlets and alter the public's perception of rare games and their value but they aren't going to know the whole story. The fact [is] that this is just a shill bidders' version of a bad joke. From now on, most people will claim that NWC can fetch as much as $100,000 but in honesty, it is not worth that much. This auction will have long-lasting and far-reaching effects on the game collecting community and market. People looking to make a quick buck will be attracted by the promise of riches and fortune. Demand will increase for these rare items with a limited supply resulting in a spike in price. This is compounded by [the] fact that people with deep pockets, sometimes called whales, will begin to turn their attention to the market and be able to make these absurd purchases and have the money to back it up.

In other words, even if Ross' cart wasn't worth $100,000, other NWC carts could be worth that much if investors and speculators from outside of the collecting community start to believe they are worth that much. After all, in the world of game collecting, as in the world of fine art, people will sometimes pay more for a good story (or the promise of price inflation) than they would pay for an object on its own.

Promoted Comments

I own one of these carts (I was a finalist) and I can clear up a few things.

1 - It's not "just" paper, it's the same glossy labels that are on normal Nintendo games. Maybe even glossier really. I've never paid it that much notice.2 - I've noticed that many of these carts have the label peeling. When mine came in the mail after the tournament the label was already peeling. Don't forget that these carts were used for over a year in the actual tournament. I don't know what storage condition they were kept in when being moved from city to city, but I imagine it was just in the back of semi trucks in their assigned NES, with all of the hot/cold conditions that would entail year round.3 - I've also seen many of the labels with a black "bleed through" of the glue. Mine has that as well, and I asked about it on the Nintendoage forums once and was told that is pretty normal.4 - Yes, I played the hell out of mine after the tournament and treated it pretty much like any of my other NES games. Most of us did. I got in touch with one of the other finalists (his father was also a finalist) a few years back who I was friends with and he said they had lost their copies (not sure if they got one or two). 5 - Until a few years ago it was kept in one of those black fake leather 10 game boxes with a gold clasp. It has now been moved to a safe deposit box. 6 - It's not just the carts that are valuable. I still have my training day plaque (the day before the finals we had a practice session and we each had our own stations, complete with fairly nice name plaques over them that we got to keep) and my city champion trophy. I've had offers for $1K each for them. I've had people offer to buy my NWC tote bag (which I couldn't find once I found it even it was valueable and probably threw it away just a couple of months prior) for $250. It was seriously one of the cheapest bags imaginable with a red NWC decal on it.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.